May is a month full of memories.
Instagram reminds me of the opinion piece I wrote for the local newspaper. Facebook shows me the final batch of leaflets and badges that arrived at the last minute, the day before the vote. Twitter is full of other people’s campaign stories and trips down memory lane. Five years since we legalised same-sex marriage. Two years since we repealed the Eighth Amendment.
I am proud of all that we achieved. I am relieved that both referendums were passed. I am also dealing with residual anger. I have slowly accepted that this anger will always be there. It has lessened as much as it can, now I must adjust to it reappearing each May.
Anger may seem like a strange response, this many years on. Except it isn’t, because the memories and celebrations are for campaigns which saw the rights of LGBTQ+ people and people who can become pregnant put to public votes. People knocked on strangers' doors asking to be granted human rights.
Newspapers, talk radio and current affairs programmes on TV were full of people claiming that marriage was actually about children, not the adults getting married. That LGBTQ+ couples were incapable of raising children without completely destroying both the institution of marriage and their children’s lives. A few years later, many of those same people were back in the media declaring with absolute certainty that women should have no control over their reproductive choices. That all pregnancies must be continued regardless of the pregnant person’s circumstances.
When people called these beliefs what they are—homophobic and misogynistic—they were told to sit down, be quiet and if you must speak definitely don’t be shrill. We were told that people had a right to have their views heard, as objectionable as they were. Yet the simple act of calling them objectionable somehow made both sides as bad as each other.
Day after day, for months leading up to the votes, the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people and women were open for debate. All in the name of balance. We asked people to share their most personal stories, with little thought for the aftermath. We expected people to lay themselves bare in the hope of changing other people’s minds. Or making people who weren’t particularly bothered about voting—despite supporting a Yes vote—realise that turning up at their polling station was, in fact, important.
I am not the only canvasser who heard people say that listening to the families from Terminations for Medical Reasons or reading the In Her Shoes Facebook page helped them fully understand why the Eighth Amendment needed to be repealed. It was hearing similar experiences that made me pro-choice in the years before the referendum.
I lost count of how many times someone told me during the marriage referendum that hearing LGBTQ+ people on the radio or being interviewed in a newspaper made them realise gay and lesbian people were “just like the rest of us, so why shouldn’t they get married?”
Sharing these stories had a huge positive impact on both campaigns, but at what cost? Behind every story was a person or a family who were subjected to, and in many cases they continue to face, untold amounts of verbal, online and sometimes physical abuse as a result of campaigning so publicly.
We talk a lot about the debt we owe people who shared their stories. We know it is a debt we can never repay. But how can we understand the lasting effects of being so open during either campaign?
I am still recovering from being a spokesperson for a rural pro-choice group. I did not have a personal story to tell, but my slightly higher profile meant that anti-choicers took to messaging me personally when their abusive comments, misleading nonsense and outright lies were deleted from Kerry for Choice’s public pages. This was small scale, but it’s something I won’t forget.
The majority of my experiences during both referendums may have been positive, but that doesn’t negate the fact that asking strangers to vote for your equality is demeaning.
I would knock on doors again in a heartbeat, but we should not have to. Our lives and our rights should never have been put to a public vote.